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The Life Aesthetic With Wes Anderson

With the release of his eighth feature film, "The Grand Budapest Hotel," Wes Anderson takes another imaginative leap into a world of his own invention

By

Howie Kahn

Feb. 26, 2014 11:44 a.m. ET

GUESTS CAME BY funicular, ascending into the foothills above the fictional European spa town of Nebelsbad in the imagined nation of Zubrowka. They were greeted—the rich, the old, the insecure; the vain, the entitled and the needy—at the Grand Budapest Hotel by its heroic, mustachioed concierge, Gustave H, dressed in a purple tailcoat, perpetually perfumed with L'Air de Panache. Inside, the floors were covered with custom Art Nouveau carpets. Vaulted staircases led up toward magnificent panels of stained glass. H instructed his staff to keep the hotel "spotless and glorified." He deemed it "a great and...